Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Death and dying are just as much human rights issues as are life and living. Yet while we have a clearly formulated right to life under the European Convention and the Human Rights Act we have no right to die at all. Our society neglects people in the last decades of their lives, and yet insists that they carry on living, even if in great pain or anguish.
It is the religious moralists among us who do most of the insisting, and yet they do not seem to insist upon making the resources available that could make older people’s lives more comfortable. It is odd how the religions I know best still cling to outdated rules and prohibitions that have either outlived their original practical point or failed to adapt to modern times. Don’t eat pork. Very sensible in hot countries without fridges and modern hygiene; superstition now. Don’t worship graven images; superfluous now.
These were rules designed to protect religions themselves and the societies in which they were practiced. Procreation and life itself were vital to their futures, but life was short and vulnerable. So life became sacred (except when authority thought otherwise). Homosexuality was therefore a sin. So too was suicide. For some religions even birth control has become sinful.
Life expectancy has expanded and is expanding still, way beyond the years that people in the earlier stages of human society could count on. But the increase in longevity has not been accompanied by an increase in the quality of life. Medical advances keep many people alive in disability, disease or dementia. If they can still live a full life this is wonderful. But all too often it can condemn them to a fate where, like Alzheimer’s disease which as Terry Pratchett has movingly described it, “strips away your living self a bit at a time”, it promises a living death for huge numbers of people.
The right to life is rightly the central human right. Yet we are denied the choice of refusing a half-life and of accelerating the ending which is also intrinsic to the human condition. Part of the right to life should also bethe right to die when we choose, and avoid drawn out, painful and undignified or wretched years that can be the inhuman consequence of medical advance. The prohibitions that once made homosexuality or suicide a sin are no longer necessary to protect societies. We largely recognise in the west that people have a human right freely to practice their sexuality, though organised religion still resists. It is time that we also recognise a human right to die – that is, through euthanasia, suicide or assisted suicide.
